Welcome to The Pedestrian

pe•des•tri•an

• (n.) a walker; one who goes about on foot
• (adj.) ordinary, commonplace

Welcome to The Pedestrian, a new quarterly journal that seeks to recover the enchantment of ordinary life.

These days it is easy to find coverage of big events, big ideas and bigger-than-life people. But as for life’s unassuming features and the people we daily interact with, they fail to inspire a comparable degree of sustained reflection. For this reason The Pedestrian was founded, so that the people and things that are familiar to us – or have become too familiar – might be allowed to enchant.

We present this journal, then, as a complement to the standard forms of popular intellectual media. These public forms of thought spend much energy upon major events, extraordinary stories, renowned people and ideological debates. They race through endless analyses, attempting to give us a clearer picture of our world, of our time, and of our culture. Sometimes they even envision the future. But their race to depict the world often results, not in a clearer view, but rather in a merely virtual world: a world where caricatures replace flesh-and-blood individuals, where groups of people and their cultures are casually defined and critiqued, and where stock narratives are imposed upon unsuspecting neighbors.

The Pedestrian, on the other hand, strives to walk, not race, through its topical explorations of life. And we expect to find so much to enchant us among the commonplace, that we are pleased to leave the comprehensive visions to other publications.

Each of our quarterly issues will present a single topic and explore it from a variety of perspectives. We invite essayists to bring their particular expertise to bear on each topic. We also invite reflections kindled by a new attentiveness to parts of life that were previously overlooked. We prefer that our writers avoid editorializing on their own opinions. Instead, we ask each writer to walk around her neighborhood, trying to express what she observes from the inside out. In other words, we propose that, rather than actively fitting other people and other things into our own comprehensive stories about the world (however compelling those stories may be), we should leisurely saunter, passively attending to the world of stories all around, even those close to home.

It is the collection of these experiences that interests us, the collection of attentive reflections by life’s many pedestrians on the pedestrian aspects of life. And we invite you to participate – by reading, writing, or discussing – as we collectively reflect upon, well, just about anything. Please familiarize yourself with the rest of this site and we hope that you consider welcoming our first issue, which is due out at the end of May.